Associated Press Huck Seed may be able to hold is own at the poker table. In the ocean? Not so much.

There is no shortage of great poker and other gambling stories that take place within the walls of a Las Vegas casino, but the best gambling stories always seem to unfold outside the casino.

Legendary proposition bets have been played out since the earliest forms of gambling. They always develop through conversation where one person bets the other that they cannot do something. There is always a catch.

One of the most told proposition bet stories revolves around Titanic Thompson. Thompson was a man of legendary proportion. A swindler of sorts who made a living in the early and mid 1900s by gambling on poker and golf and everything in between, he spent his entire life looking for the next sucker.

The amount of the wager is disputed — some say it was for $25,000 while others tell the tale at $1 million or more — but Thompson's most famous proposition bet centered around a single golf shot.

As told in Thomas ·”Amarillo Slim” Preston’s book “A World Full of Fat People,” Thompson insisted that he could hit a golf ball off the tee one mile in length. His only condition was that he got to pick the location for the shot and the time of the year to do it.

Now no professional golfer or long-drive champion can hit a golf ball more than 450 yards much less a mile. Even a ball hit off the face of a mountain will struggle to make it even half the distance of the 1,600-meter length. Thompson's eager bet taker considered it money in the bank.
It was clear he didn't know much of Thompson's history to put the odds in his favor.

Thompson opted to hit his shot in the dead of winter. He teed the ball up on an iced-over frozen lake and let it rip. The clear iced-over water was as smooth as a plate of glass and the ball rolled on and on with nothing to slow it down. Before it finally rested, the ball traveled well over a mile on the ice, securing a win in Thompson's favor.

Another outlandish wager involving water didn't fare so well for the bet maker. World Series of Poker champion Huck Seed once took a bet that he could stand in the ocean up to his shoulders for 18-consecutive hours. Seed wasn't required to swim or float, he just had to stay up to his neck in the water.

Thinking that it was an easy win, Seed accepted Phil Hellmuth's $50,000 bet that he could do it. Seed lasted only three hours before calling it a day; determining that the $2,780 per hour he was getting on the bet wasn't enough to plow through the agony.

Chuck Blount | 210SA Contributor